“it is with a mix of curiousness and concern that I try to wrap my head around some of the challenges of creating social interactions in a decentralised manner, while respecting the privacy of people and keeping them in control over their own data”

Even the IndieWeb website doesn’t do a great job of explaining what it is, or what it means to “join the IndieWeb”. As far as I can tell, it’s a collection of practices and technologies that connects independent blog-type websites together into a quasi social network.

When taking the decisions I have about leaving the major social networks over the past few years (LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Facebook, Twitter) and moving towards a more #indieweb online existence I am aware that I am placing myself within a certain community with certain ideals.

In a conversation on micro.blog (also a comment thread hereEivind Hjertnes asked why I chose to microblog on WordPress rather than using a hosted account at micro dot blog.

The initial answer was simple – I’ve had this WordPress blog since 2008 so it just made sense. But, as I’ve said before, it goes way beyond that and is very much the driving factor behind a lot of what I’ve been doing lately in culling various accounts.

”Some of my favorite memories of writing online were during the early days of Blogger, prior to the Google acquisition. Personal journals were still a fairly new idea, with fairly few people publishing them. We were a community of people and of writers and we had a connection to each other and a desire to share, help, and enjoy unique content online. This feels like that.”

Ryan reports that we have likely passed the “1 million webmentions sent” mark which is a brilliant milestone and achievement.

As he explains, while there are a few larger services, such as webmention.io and Bridgy, the very idea behind webmentions is that they don’t require a central conduit. They are designed to be point to point, directly from one site to another, so the actual number could be higher.

While quickly discussing an issue (where native comments from others were posted as from me on micro.blog) Aaron Parecki pointed out on the #indieweb slack that the microformats markup was incomplete in that the comments were missing h-cards.

”For the month of November… I’m going to endeavor to lovingly craft together a string of about 2,000 words a day on the topic of the IndieWeb to create a book geared toward helping non-developers… more easily own their online identities and content.” – Chris Aldrich.

As I’ve written before, I think mass adoption of #indieweb technologies (at least in their current guise) is only likely to happen by stealth. There needs to be a big player willing to dip their toes in the water and really drive things forward in a way that is invisible to end users.

Part of the “magic” of the #indieweb is microformats markup (more specifically, microformats2) which helps sites pick out key pieces of information from one another so they can communicate more effectively.